Blog 3

On your blog this week, we are asking you to reflect on media use in your own home. We will give you more advice on this in the lecture and in the tutorials this week

Throughout the span of my life, media use in my house has constantly and rapidly evolved. Thinking back as far as I can go back, to preschool at the age of 5, my parents would allow me to play educational computer games. These games were on CD-ROM’s that needed to be inserted into the big brain box of the computer. I also listened to music personally on my portable CD player, while my parents would make use of their 6 disk changing CD player with surround sound in the house. In the car, we had the option of listening to CD, AM/FM Radio, as well as tapes. I often listened to my Barney the Dinosaur tapes and drove my parents crazy. I also watched TV on Saturday mornings. Back then, cable was a necessity and I would watch cartoons as well as Disney channel, waiting for my favorite shows to come on as listed on the TV guide including Lizzie McGuire and SpongeBob SquarePants.

I am the oldest child in my family, with 2 younger brothers. Chad who is 3 years younger than me, experienced his childhood in regards to media use exactly the same as I did. However, my other younger brother, Cody, is 11 years younger than me, and I definitely have noticed that his experience with media is drastically different than anything I experienced as a young child. In comparison to my early childhood experience, he has grown up in an immensely different technological era. By the time he was 4, he was gifted an iPad, and let me just say, that was crazy to me. As crazy as it sounds though, I think that it may have been very beneficial. The educational games, music, and TV that I used to access on different mediums were all accessible to him on his single screen of the iPad. He was able to maneuver his way around the device at a very early age. That just goes to show how adaptive humans are in their early stages, as sometimes my four-year-old brother at the time was showing my parents the capabilities of his iPad. I find that it allows for more efficient media use, but at the same time, it also sometimes made for too much media use. Among today’s generation of kids, as media use increases with its ease of access and convenience, it is often overused and taken advantage of, leading to unhealthy habits of overuse among us all.

As technology advances, it changes how we use media in our everyday lives. And as it grows, our habits also evolve. Newer generations are bound to live differently than older ones, which will entail both benefits and consequences. Although my generations habits during early childhood and the generation of my younger brothers differ, it is an advancement that needs to be well adjusted too, to live a well-balanced lifestyle.